Forgery Test · week 1 · archive

Ten snippets. Five wounds. Revealed.

This is the archive of week 1. 5 snippets came from our pipeline; 5 we broke on purpose to demonstrate specific craft wounds. The current week’s test is at /forgery-test.

Opened 2026-05-18.

The five wounds in this ballot

Wound: abstract bridge

Clean

She left the coffee cup half full
the spoon still wet on the counter
I let the milk go bad on purpose
just to keep the morning from ending

Broken

She left the coffee cup half full
the morning was a feeling
of something ending in the air
the way endings always feel

The second half abandons the concrete image (coffee cup, spoon) for vague generalities ("a feeling of something ending"). The room's Cosmology bar rejects this — every line needs to stay in the room with the cup.

Wound: banned term

Clean

Three rows back, I held my father's coat
the priest said all the prayers I knew
I waited for the part where I would cry
but the part never came

Broken

The church was full of echoes
of the man my father used to be
his coat hung empty in my arms
like a shadow of a memory

"Echoes" + "shadow of a memory" are on the 87-banned-AI-clichés list. Even when the meaning is grammatical, these phrases mark the text as machine-shaped. The post-generation cliché sweep would flag and replace.

Wound: forced rhyme

Clean

Bus station at 4am
the vending machine takes my last quarter
I press the wrong button on purpose
a stranger watches me decide

Broken

At the station I was waiting
for a bus that wasn't fated
to arrive on time today
so I thought I'd run away

"Fated/waiting/away/today" — the rhyme scheme is doing the writing. "Wasn't fated to arrive on time" is not a sentence a human reaches for; the rhyme summoned it. The room's Truth voice would catch this on Round 2.

Wound: hedge words

Clean

You sent me a photo of your kitchen
the light wrong, the floor unswept
I kept it open on my phone all day
just to see where you live now

Broken

Maybe you sent a photo
or perhaps it was the light
I could be remembering wrong
but sometimes that's how love goes

"Maybe / perhaps / could be / sometimes" — the persona-forge prompt explicitly bans these. A lyric that hedges its own claims has no spine. Commit to the perspective; if uncertain, infer the most coherent version.

Wound: genre mismatch

Clean

Day 47, the parking lot is full
my coffee is the wrong temperature
I walk past the building three times
before I go in the door

Broken

Day 47 of the inner journey
the parking lot of my soul
unspooling like a forgotten dream
in the quiet kingdom of the self

"Inner journey / parking lot of my soul / quiet kingdom of the self" reads as workshop-poetry vocabulary forced onto a recovery setting. The room's Genre Lock would block this — recovery songwriting lives in concrete tactical detail, not abstract self-talk.

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